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It turns out that I already had a pretty good idea of where Thomas NICHOLLS and Martha DRAPPER were married. Last week I went to the London Family History Centre and checked the parish registers for Chiddingstone, Kent expecting to find the marriage of my 4x great-grandparents.

I didn’t find the marriage, but I wasn’t really that surprised, the only reason I was expecting to find the marriage in Chiddingstone is because that is where the couple were living in the 1841 census, the year after they were married. I had hoped to avoid the cost of buying a certificate, but short of searching every nearby parish I had no real option but to order their marriage certificate.

Then last night as I was doing some digital filing I discovered that I already had a pretty good idea where the couple were married and even a very good idea of when. It seems that last time I was doing some research into the NICHOLLS family I had found the banns of marriage for Thomas and Martha, but hadn’t done anything with that information because I was unable to prove that they were the parents of my 3x great-grandmother Ellen NICHOLLS.

I had just filed that snippet of information away on my spreadsheet and completely forgot about it when I started looking at the family again. The good thing is that I wouldn’t have been able to check the marriage register last week anyway because the LFHC don’t hold that particular microfilm.

It might have saved me a little bit of time, but even that is unlikely as I still needed to check Chiddingstone marriages for Martha’s siblings. So in the end the impact wasn’t too great, but I could have wasted a lot of time and effort when I didn’t really need to.

Now I am pretty confident that Thomas and Martha were married in Sundridge, Kent (about 7 or 8 miles north of Chiddingstone). The banns were published in Chiddingstone (and presumably also in Sundridge) on the 23rd February, 1st March and 8th March 1840. From this the likely date for the marriage was 15th March 1840.

To my surprise Thomas was of the parish of Chiddingstone and Martha was of the parish of Sundridge. I had expected it to be the other way around, assuming that Martha and her family came from Chiddingstone and Thomas was travelling around to wherever there was work. I am sure future research will clarify the picture.

In the meantime I still need to wait patiently for the marriage certificate to confirm the date and place, and more importantly the father’s names for the bridge and groom.